Legion Conquers With Cards

Illawarra Mercury

Monday November 10, 1997

By CAMERON BIGGART

If you are a fan of the Command & Conquer style of game then perhaps 7th Legion, from Microprose, will tickle your fancy.

Some clever clogs have come up with the idea of combining a top down real-time combat war game with some elements of a card game like Uno or Magic the Gathering.

The way it works is like this: You command your troops and you build factories to churn out vehicles and infantry soldiers from a central command, nothing new under the sun so far.

Then you send your troops off a-hunting to see what havoc and destruction they can cause.

Here is where you start to notice differences.

The first obvious thing is that the "fog of war/shroud of darkness" that covers the map at the start of the level is removed by your troop movements, only to blanket the field again some minutes later if your troops have passed by and moved on.

The effect of this is that you can end up with an army half way across the map but if they have been there a while then you can't see the path they took to get there and this can make for sometimes confusing gameplay.

The cross with Uno or MTG is with a set of "war cards" that are dealt out to you at the start of each mission and replenished once every two budget cycles.

With the cards you can make select units invisible, steal abilities from the enemy or even destroy whole units of troops at a time.

The beauty of the cards is that because they are randomly distributed for each mission, no two battles are ever going to be fought in the same way, as your tactics, and those of the computer will depend on what cards you have available at any given time.

As your units plunder the screen and perform their ethnic cleansing duty the more veteran units will rise in rank from sergeant to general, increasing their fighting skills and damage tolerance as they do.

As a commander you also rise in rank as your troops perform their duty and your pay for each budget cycle - about five minutes of gameplay - increases with your rank.

As the mission progresses you will also be offered on the spot mini missions to destroy some particular enemy structure or a certain number of enemy units and if successful will be rewarded with huge numbers of credits.

There are time limits on these missions so you sometimes need to be fleet of foot in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

7th legion is up there with the leaders in this genre and the randomness of the cards adds an element of surprise that can be lacking in other similar games.

It scores Graphics 6/10, Sound 6/10, Gameplay 7/10, Addictiveness 7/10, Overall 7/10.